Copyright law is unique in the greater intellectual property regime, as it protects original expression that is fixed in a tangible medium and is the product of authorship. This course is designed for creative professionals — such as screenwriters, musicians, documentary filmmakers or artists — who want to understand the scope and limits of which works can enjoy U.S. copyright protection. The course will introduce students to the workings of copyright law through an examination of the system’s basic principles, rules, and institutions. Topics will include; the justifications for copyright law, copyrightable subject matter, authorship, the nature and scope of copyright’s exclusive rights, fair use, and remedies for infringement.
We will also explore real-world examples of legal battles surrounding copyright law, from the recent litigation over Robin Thicke’s hit song “Blurred Lines” to more peculiar cases such as the infamous “monkey selfie” case. By understanding what copyright does and does not protect, producers of creative expression will be able to protect and maximize the commercial value of their works.

Impartido por:

Shyam Balganesh

Professor of Law

Transcripción

The next right in the copyright owner's bundle of rights is the public performance right. Now, the public performance right, unlike the rights that we've been discussing thus far, applies only to specific categories of creative works. So according to the terms of the statue, it only applies to literary, musical, dramatic and choreographic, pantomimes, motion pictures, and other audiovisual works. Now, you may be wondering, so what's really excluded? What's excluded from the protection of the public performance right is a category called pictorial graphic and sculpture works, or things like photographs or sculptures. They cannot be performed obviously, and therefore the law does not give them a public performance right. The public performance right, put very simply, gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to perform the work publicly or to authorize the performance of the work publicly. And in what I just described, the two obvious questions that emerge are what does it mean to perform a work, and what does it mean to do so publicly? Here, unlike with most or the other rights, thankfully, Congress has provided us in the statute with a definition that I'm going to go over and try and explain if there's anything unclear on it. So Congress says to perform a work means to recite, render, play, dance, or act it, either directly or by means of any device or process. Or in the case of a motion picture, or other audiovisual work, to show its images in any sequence, or to make the sounds accompanying it audible. So as you see from this definition, Congress wanted to keep the idea of a performance pretty broad, to cover anything that you might consider a performance. Whether it's a human physical performance, such as a play or dance, or a technological one using any device or process. Congress consciously wanted to maintain an element of technological neutrality when it uses the phrases, any device or process. Specifically with the motion picture it also says that showing it at any form, or even showing the sounds accompanying it constitute a performance. So a very broad, open-ended definition of what a performance is. But what is it then mean for it to do so publicly? And here Congress says to perform something publicly can come in two forms. In the first, something is performed publicly when it is performed in a place that is either open to the public or where a reasonable number of strangers are gathered. So this is based on the physical location of the performance, that's when it is done publicly. So that first prong is sort of a physicality or location-based understanding of publicly performing something. It's based on whether general members of the public have access to that particular place where it's performed. That's one option. The second option was put in specifically in light of the cable and broadcast television, and it's called the transmit clause in the definition. And Congress says to perform something publicly also means to transmit it using a device, where people can receive it either in the same place at the same time, or in different places and at different times. So what Congress had in mind was working of the cable television, very clearly. That you could have something being put in either in the nature of video on demand, where you could view it in your individual room at different times, stopping and playing it. Or in the nature of cable television, where you didn't really have control over where you view it. Congress wanted to cover the whole set of transmission options, either where you didn't have control over place and time, or where you had control over one or the other. That's the gamut of the transmit clause. So the definition of publicly includes a location-based understanding, or a transmission-based understanding. The important thing to note about the public performance right, and especially about its history, is that it was put in against the backdrop of the growth of cable and broadcast television. In fact this right was so controversial that it delayed the passage of the copyright statute by many many years, and what eventually came in was a series of intricate compromises. And so the thing to note is that when Congress put it in, Congress was aware of its need to cover a wide range of technologies. And very importantly for it to capture technological developments beyond the existing structure of cable television as it existed at that point. That's the public performance right.